Elementary Classroom Quotes

Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, and my worry now is that we're brainwashing them from the cradle, and in the end even the ones who are smart will be too damned foolish. What do I mean? I mean the second graders at Appleton Elementary, sometimes the first graders even, and by the time they get to my classroom, to the third grad, they're well and truly gone -- they're full of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits and they care how their hair looks! In the third grade. They care more about their hair or their shoes than about galaxies or caterpillars or hieroglyphics. How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? Even worse on your tombstone than "dutiful daughter" is "looking good"; everyone used to know that. But we're lost in a world of appearances now.

The only working model of socialism I have ever seen is in an elementary school classroom.

A FEW YEARS AGO, I heard a wonderful story, which I’m very fond of telling. An elementary school teacher was giving a drawing class to a group of six-year-old children. At the back of the classroom sat a little girl who normally didn’t pay much attention in school. In the drawing class she did. For more than twenty minutes, the girl sat with her arms curled around her paper, totally absorbed in what she was doing. The teacher found this fascinating. Eventually, she asked the girl what she was drawing. Without looking up, the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” Surprised, the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” The girl said, “They will in a minute.

Since most sexual abuse begins well before puberty, preventive education, if it is to have any effect at all, should begin early in grade school. Ideally, information on sexual abuse should be integrated into a general curriculum of sex education. In those communities where the experiment has been tried, it has been shown conclusively that children can learn what they most need to know about sexual abuse, without becoming unduly frightened or developing generally negative sexual attitudes. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, for example, the Hennepin County Attorney's office developed an education program on sexual assault for elementary school children. The program was presented to all age groups in four different schools, some eight hundred children in all. The presentation opened with a performance by a children’s theater group, illustrating the difference between affectionate touching, and exploitative touching. The children’s responses to the skits indicated that they understood the distinction very well indeed. Following the presentation, about one child in six disclosed a sexual experience with an adult, ranging from an encounter with an exhibitionist to involvement in incest. Most of the children, both boys and girls, had not told anyone prior to the classroom discussion. In addition to basic information on sexual relations and sexual assault, children need to know that they have the right to their own bodily integity.

he was coming while in the elementary school classroom,

The New Groupthink is also practiced in our schools, via an increasingly popular method of instruction called “cooperative” or “small group” learning. In many elementary schools, the traditional rows of seats facing the teacher have been replaced with “pods” of four or more desks pushed together to facilitate countless group learning activities. Even subjects like math and creative writing, which would seem to depend on solo flights of thought, are often taught as group projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited, a big sign announced the “Rules for Group Work,” including, YOU CAN’T ASK A TEACHER FOR HELP UNLESS EVERYONE IN YOUR GROUP HAS THE SAME QUESTION.

It is not unusual for children with ADHD, especially those who are not hyperactive and are very bright, to do quite well in elementary school, where they spend a significant portion of each school day in one classroom with a single teacher who can provide considerable structure and stability for each student in that stable group. The teacher gets to know each student and can support her in her academic work and in resolving difficulties in social relationships.

Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent leaves to the ground all at once, and Zora Belsey had that strange, late-September feeling that somewhere in a small classroom with small chairs an elementary school teacher was waiting for her. It seemed wrong that she should be walking towards town without a shiny tie and a pleated skirt, without a selection of scented erasers. Time is not what it is but how it is felt, and Zora felt no different.

What I have said about the newspapers and the movies applies equally to the radio, to television, and even to bookselling. Thus we are in an age where the enormous per capita bulk of communication is met by an ever-thinning stream of total bulk of communication. More and more we must accept a standardized inoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white bread of the bakeries, is made rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its food value. This is fundamentally an external handicap of modern communication, but it is paralleled by another which gnaws from within. This is the cancer of creative narrowness and feebleness. In the old days, the young man who wished to enter the creative arts might either have plunged in directly or prepared himself by a general schooling, perhaps irrelevant to the specific tasks he finally undertook, but which was at least a searching discipline of his abilities and taste. Now the channels of apprenticeship are largely silted up. Our elementary and secondary schools are more interested in formal classroom discipline than in the intellectual discipline of learning something thoroughly, and a great deal of the serious preparation for a scientific or a literary course is relegated to some sort of graduate school or other.

Before every elementary school classroom had a 'Drop Everything and Read' period, before parents and educators agonized more about children being glued to Call of Duty or getting sucked into the vortex of the Internet, reading as a childhood activity was not always revered. Maybe it was in some families, in some towns, in some magical places that seemed to exist only in stories, but not where I was. Nobody trotted out the kid who read all the time as someone to be admired like the ones who did tennis and ballet and other feats requiring basic coordination. While those other kids pursued their after-school activities in earnest, I failed at art, gymnastics, ice skating, soccer, and ballet with a lethal mix of inability, fear and boredom. Coerced into any group endeavor, I wished I could just be home already. Rainy days were a godsend because you could curl up on a sofa without being banished into the outdoors with an ominous 'Go play outside.' Well into adulthood, I would chastise myself over not settling on a hobby—knitting or yoga or swing dancing or crosswords—and just reading instead. The default position. Everyone else had a passion; where was mine? How much happier I would have been to know that reading was itself a passion. Nobody treated it that way, and it didn't occur to me to think otherwise.

Yet trauma has been hard for the academic world to define and therefore understand its full scope. Part of the challenge is that ‘bad event’ is subjective. Let’s take an example. Consider, say, a fire at an elementary school. A veteran fire-fighter can walk right up to the flames and put them out, business as usual. In contrast, a first-grader witnessing his classroom burst into flames will experience minutes of intense fear, confusion, and helplessness. This illustrates one of the key issues in understanding a potentially traumatic event. How does the individual experience the event? What is going on inside the person; is the stress response activated in extreme and prolonged ways?

SCHOOL IN AMERICA was easy, assignments sent in by e-mail, classrooms air-conditioned, professors willing to give makeup tests. But she was uncomfortable with what the professors called “participation,” and did not see why it should be part of the final grade; it merely made students talk and talk, class time wasted on obvious words, hollow words, sometimes meaningless words. It had to be that Americans were taught, from elementary school, to always say something in class, no matter what. And so she sat stiff-tongued, surrounded by students who were all folded easily on their seats, all flush with knowledge, not of the subject of the classes, but of how to be in the classes. They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge.

You’re going to get an F.” Spencer shifted the papers on his school desk and looked for a hundredth time at the graffiti in the corner. Last year’s occupant of the desk must have spent hours etching the message into the wooden surface. Dummy, Spencer thought. Couldn’t even spell cabbage. Truth be told, Mrs. Natcher did smell a little like cabbage sometimes, but she was still tolerable. Today, however, a strong Bath and Body Works fragrance filled the sixth-grade classroom and Mrs. Natcher was nowhere to be seen. In her place was a thin, younger woman who had short, stylish hair streaked with pink highlights. She wore high-heeled red shoes and a skirt so short that Mrs. Natcher would have croaked. Turned out that Mrs. Natcher had croaked—well, almost—which was why Miss Leslie Sharmelle had been called to Welcher Elementary that morning. Spencer glanced at the clock on the wall.

It is a truism today, in this highly technologically-developed culture, that students need technical computer skills. Equally truistic (and, not incidentally, true) is that the workplace has become highly technological. Even more truistic – and far more disturbing – are the shifts in education over the last two decades as public elementary schools, public and private high schools, and colleges and universities have invested scores of billions of dollars on “digital infrastructure,” computers, monitors and printers, “smart classrooms,” all to “meet the demands” of this new technological workplace. "We won’t dwell on the fact – an inconvenient truth? – that those technological investments have coincided with a decline in American reading behaviors, in reading and reading comprehension scores, in overall academic achievement, in the phenomenon – all too familiar to us in academia – of “grade inflation,” in an alarming collapse of our students’ understanding of their own history (to say nothing of the history of the rest of the world), rising ignorance of world and American geography, with an abandonment of the idea of objectivity, and with an increasingly subjective, even solipsistic, emphasis on personal experience. Ignore all this. Or, if we find it impossible to ignore, then let’s blame the teachers...

When teachers participate in a literary experience with a professionally presented children's play, they are offering their students a text quite different from anything that they will experience within their classrooms. Within this literary experience, teachers join as equals with their students, and each, as audience members within the darkened space of the performance, create their own poems to hold within themselves or share with others.

In 1999, Emily Rosa published her paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was titled “A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch.” Unlike Mehmet Oz, Rosa wasn’t a cardiovascular surgeon. In fact, she had never graduated from medical school. Or college. Or high school. Or elementary school. When it came time to write her paper, she had asked her mother, a nurse, to help. That’s because Emily was only nine years old. Her experiment was part of a fourth-grade science fair project in Fort Collins, Colorado. Emily didn’t win the science fair. “It wasn’t a big deal in my classroom,” recalled Rosa, who graduated from the University of Colorado at Denver in 2009. “I showed it to a few of my teachers, but they really didn’t care, which kind of hurt my feelings.” Emily’s mother, Linda, recalled that “some of the teachers were getting therapeutic touch during the noon hour. They didn’t recommend it for the district science fair. It just wasn’t well received at the school.

It’s helpful to know that Eden drew his inspiration from a classic study led by the Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal, who teamed up with Lenore Jacobson, the principal of an elementary school in San Francisco. In eighteen different classrooms, students from kindergarten through fifth grade took a Harvard cognitive ability test. The test objectively measured students’ verbal and reasoning skills, which are known to be critical to learning and problem solving. Rosenthal and Jacobson shared the test results with the teachers: approximately 20 percent of the students had shown the potential for intellectual blooming, or spurting. Although they might not look different today, their test results suggested that these bloomers would show “unusual intellectual gains” over the course of the school year.

The Responsive Classroom approach creates an ideal environment for learning--every teacher should know about it.

1a What language do you speak best? Do you speak more than one language equally well? 1b When did you begin to learn this language (these languages)? 2     Which second or foreign language(s) have you learned with the most success? 3     Which second or foreign language(s) have you learned with the least success? 4     For the languages you mentioned in response to questions 2 and 3, answer the following questions in the appropriate columns:   Languages learned successfully Languages not learned successfully How old were you when you first tried to learn the language?                                                             Did you have a choice about learning this language or were you required to learn it?                                                           Do you currently speak this language regularly?                                                           Do you regularly read this language for information or enjoyment?                                                           How much of your learning experience with this language was in a foreign language classroom?                                                           If you no longer use this language on a daily basis, can you estimate how many years you spent learning or using it?                                                           Estimate how many hours of classroom instruction you had for this language.                                                           How much time have you spent living in a place where the language is spoken?                                                           Have you used the language to learn other subjects at school? At what level (elementary, secondary, university)?                                                           Do you have personal or emotional attachments to this language? For example, do you have peers or family members who speak this language?                                                           Do/did you enjoy studying the grammar of this language?                                                           Do/did you enjoy studying vocabulary in this language?                                                           Are/were you a successful student in other school subjects? Do you think of yourself as a person who likes to socialize? Do you think of yourself as a person who learns a new language easily? Photocopiable © Oxford University Press Table 3.1 Individual differences in language learning experience

I'm a teacher and children's book blogger, so I am always on the lookout for new and interesting children's books. If you are a children's author and would like me to look at and/or write about your book, feel free to send me a message.

And a first-grade classroom is the place where words are born, and reborn, year after year, cradles of letters and sounds. Here, words linger longer in the air than in any other space on earth, inviting us to capture them, revel in them, then walk away with them into the world, hand in hand. Words, like children, wait to be noticed, then known, then ennobled. Words are the scaffolding upon which we build our lives.

Employees who sit near windows report higher energy levels and tend to be more physically active both in and out of the office. In a study of elementary schools, students in classrooms with the most daylight advanced as much as 26 percent faster in reading and 20 percent faster in math over the course of a year. Hospital patients assigned to sunnier rooms were discharged sooner and required less pain medication than those in rooms with less light.

As a counselor at Georgetown Elementary School explained, low-income and minority students, especially black boys, were less likely to be screened or referred to gifted placement than higher-income white students because their behavior was seen as “disruptive” and used as an indicator of low potential. In contrast, at Ivory Elementary School, minority students (Latinos and African Americans combined) were overrepresented in the gifted program because school staff had made a deliberate effort to change the way they viewed and assessed “disruptive” behavior: behaviors described as “overly social” and “showing signs of boredom” and “curiosity” were reframed as indications that a child might need more challenging curricular materials. According to school personnel, many of these students began to thrive academically and their classroom behavior improved after placement in the gifted program.

Adam: Adam was a young man whose anxiety turned into a monster. Where Shelly had a very mild case of social anxiety, Adam’s case could only be called severe. Over a period of several years, his underlying social fears developed into a full-blown school phobia. A quiet, unassuming person, Adam had never stood out in the classroom. Through elementary school and on into high school, he neither excelled nor failed his subjects. By no means a discipline problem, the “shy” Adam kept to himself and seldom talked in class, whether to answer a teacher’s question or chat with his buddies. In fact, he really had no friends, and the only peers he socialized with were his cousins, whom he saw at weekly family gatherings. Though he watched the other kids working together on projects or playing sports together, Adam never approached them to join in. Maybe they wouldn’t let him, he thought. Maybe he wasn’t good enough. Being rejected was not a chance he was willing to take. Adam never tried hard in school either. If he didn’t understand something, he kept quiet, fearful that raising his hand would bring ridicule. When he did poorly on an exam or paper, it only confirmed to him what he was sure was true: He didn’t measure up. He became so apprehensive about his tests that he began to feel physically ill at the thought of each approaching reminder of his inadequacy. Even though he had studied hard for a math test, for example, he could barely bring himself to get out of bed on the morning it was to take place. His parents, who thought of their child as a reserved but obedient boy who would eventually grow out of this awkward adolescent stage, did not pressure him. Adam was defensive and withdrawn, overwrought by the looming possibility that he would fail. For the two class periods preceding the math test, Adam’s mind was awash with geometry theorems, and his stomach churning. As waves of nausea washed over him, he began to salivate and swallowed hard. His eyes burned and he closed them, wishing he could block the test from his mind. When his head started to feel heavy and he became short of breath, he asked for a hall pass and headed for the bathroom. Alone, he let his anxiety overtake him as he stared into the mirror, letting the cool water flow from the faucet and onto his sweaty palms. He would feel better, he thought, if he could just throw up. But even when he forced his finger down his throat, there was no relief. His dry heaves made him feel even weaker. He slumped to the cold tile and began to cry. Adam never went back to math class that day; instead, he got a pass from the nurse and went straight home. Of course, the pressure Adam was feeling was not just related to the math test. The roots of his anxiety went much deeper. Still, the physical symptoms of anxiety became so debilitating that he eventually quit going to school altogether. Naturally, his parents were extremely concerned but also uncertain what to do. It took almost a year before Adam was sufficiently in control of his symptoms to return to school.

The MindUp program (Hawn Foundation, 2011), now available for the elementary grades from Scholastic, covers four units: “How Our Brains Work,” “Sharpening Your Senses,” “It’s All about Attitude,” and “Taking Action Mindfully.

Innovations are happening in conventional schooling. Some people will read the chapters to come and respond that their own children’s schools are incorporating evidence-based changes, making them more like Montessori schools—eliminating grades, combining ages, using a lot of group work, and so on. One could take the view that over the years, conventional schooling has gradually been discovering and incorporating many of the principles that Dr. Montessori discovered in the first half of the 20th century. However, although schooling is changing, those changes are often relatively superficial. A professor of education might develop a new reading or math program that is then adopted with great fanfare by a few school systems, but the curricular change is minute relative to the entire curriculum, and the Lockean model of the child and the factory structure of the school environment still underlie most of the child’s school day and year. “Adding new ‘techniques’ to the classroom does not lead to the developmental of a coherent philosophy. For example, adding the technique of having children work in ‘co-operative learning’ teams is quite different than a system in which collaboration is inherent in the structure” (Rogoff, Turkanis, & Bartlett, 2001, p. 13). Although small changes are made reflecting newer research on how children learn, particularly in good neighborhood elementary schools, most of the time, in most U.S. schools, conventional structures predominate (Hiebert, 1999; McCaslin et al., 2006; NICHD, 2005; Stigler, Gallimore, & Hiebert, 2000), and observers rate most classes to be low in quality (Weiss, Pasley, Smith, Banilower, & Heck, 2003). Superficial insertions of research-supported methods do not penetrate the underlying models on which are schools are based. Deeper change, implementing more realistic models of the child and the school, is necessary to improve schooling. How can we know what those new models should be? As in medicine, where there have been increasing calls for using research results to inform patient treatments, education reform must more thoroughly and deeply implement what the evidence indicates will work best. This has been advocated repeatedly over the years, even by Thorndike. Certainly more and more researchers, educators, and policy makers are heeding the call to take an evidence-based stance on education. Yet the changes made thus far in response to these calls have not managed to address to the fundamental problems of the poor models. The time has come for rethinking education, making it evidence based from the ground up, beginning with the child and the conditions under which children thrive. Considered en masse, the evidence from psychological research suggests truly radical change is needed to provide children with a form of schooling that will optimize their social and cognitive development. A better form of schooling will change the Lockean model of the child and the factory structure on which our schools are built into something radically different and much better suited to how children actually learn.

THAT’S EMPHATICALLY not the case in the classroom helmed by Maureen Zink, a fourth-grade teacher at Vallecito Elementary School in San Rafael, California. Her students don’t sit still at their desks; in fact, most of them are not sitting at all. In 2013, the entire school replaced traditional desks and chairs with standing desks, and the school’s “activity-permissive” ethos allows pupils to stand upright, perch on stools, sit on the floor, and otherwise move around as they wish. Though some were hesitant about the change, Zink and the other teachers at Vallecito now say it’s been a resounding success; students are more alert, more attentive, and more engaged. “I taught at sitting desks for 30 years,” says Zink, “and I’ll never go back.” Tracy Smith, the principal at Vallecito during the switch to standing desks, agrees that students are “more focused, confident, and productive” when given license to move.

To mix business with pleasure, schedule your next staff retreat in an elementary school. Talking about strategic priorities takes on new meaning when you’re in a classroom whose bulletin boards admonish everyone to Play Fair, Don’t Hit, and Be Nice. And if this retro approach is really working for you, head to a children's museum for a day of discovery. You’ll benefit not only from tackling the hands-on museum exhibits, but also by soaking in the learning and laughter of the little people around you.

This is not a book I could have imagined writing a dozen years ago. When an older couple from another town attempted to set up and lead a Bible club at my daughter's public elementary school in Southern California in 2009, they might as well have been alien visitors showing up at a beach party. The purpose of the club was to convince children as young as five that they would burn for an eternity if they failed to conform to a strict interpretation of the Christian faith. The club's organizers were offered free and better space in the evangelical church next door to our school, but they refused it; they insisted on holding the club in the public school because they knew the kids would think the message was coming from the school. They referred to our public school as their "mission field" and our children as "the harvest." ... As I researched the group behind these kindergarten missionaries, I saw that they were part of a national network of clubs. I soon discovered that this network was itself just one of many initiatives to insert reactionary religion into public schools across the country. Then I realized that these initiatives were the fruit of a nationally coordinated effort not merely to convert other people's children in the classroom but to undermine public education altogether. Belatedly, I understood that the conflict they provoked in our local community- -I was hardly the only parent who found their presence in the public school alarming was not an unintended consequence of their activity. It was of a piece with their plan to destroy confidence in our system of education and make way for a system of religious education more to their liking.

In the early grades, being in positive classroom climates with friendly, considerate teachers is linked to greater self-regulation, less disruptive behavior, and higher teacher-rated social competence among elementary and middle school students. Middle school teachers whose classrooms support increasing student autonomy and competence can build personal relationships in which students feel known, valued, and respected. Gains in middle grade achievement and reduced levels of disruptive behavior are evidence in classrooms in which expectations are clear, time is used well and productively, and teachers respond effectively to variations in students’ motivation and focus. Similarly, strong, positive, and cooperative relationships with teachers increase high school students’ likelihood of graduating.

was back in elementary school explaining why my mom didn’t come to help in the classroom, why my clothes didn’t fit.

One study found that the reading scores of students in a New York City elementary school were significantly lower if their classrooms were situated close to elevated subway tracks on which trains rattled past every four to five minutes. When the researchers, armed with their findings, pressed NYC transit system officials and Board of Education members to install noise-dampening materials on the tracks and in the classrooms, students’ scores jumped back up. Similar results have been found for children near airplane flight paths. When the city of Munich, Germany, moved its airport, the memory and reading scores of children near the new location plummeted, while those near the old location rose significantly.

In the late summer of 2020, Kila Posey asked the principal of Mary Lin Elementary School, in the wealthy suburbs of Atlanta, whether she could request a specific teacher for her seven-year-old daughter. “No worries,” the principal responded at first. “Just send me the teacher’s name.” But when Posey emailed her request, the principal kept suggesting that a different teacher would be a better fit. Eventually, Posey, who is Black, demanded to know why her daughter couldn’t have her first choice. “Well,” the principal admitted, “that’s not the Black class.” The story sounds depressingly familiar. It evokes the long and brutal history of segregation, conjuring up visions of white parents who are horrified at the prospect of their children having classmates who are Black. But there is a perverse twist: the principal, Sharyn Briscoe, is herself Black. As Posey told the Atlanta Black Star, she was left in “disbelief that I was having this conversation in 2020 with a person that looks just like me—a Black woman. It’s segregating classrooms. You cannot segregate classrooms. You can’t do it.

Elementary Einsteins: Four Simple Steps to Challenging Gifted Kids in your Classroom,

Furthermore, academic fads have been forced upon successive generations of elementary and secondary school students, including the “New Math,” the “Open Classroom,” “Values Clarification,” “Cooperative Learning,” “Outcome-Based Education,” “No Child Left Behind,” and more recently “Common Core” and “Race to the Top,” for which trillions of dollars have been and are being wasted on inferior educational outcomes. Even the once-heralded school lunch program is not safe from statist overreach, where billions of dollars are spent on federally mandated lunches that many students refuse to eat.23

The fifth grade classroom was on the second floor of the elementary school overlooking the playground. Carrie glanced up. The blinds were split apart where her teacher's fingers were holding them open and Mrs. Huffity was looking down. It did seem that she was looking directly at them.

What a child experiences between the ages of seven and ten will determine his actions as a teenager and an adult.” I thought this was crucial information for future elementary school teachers, and I found that it was not addressed in their education courses. “Killer in the Classroom” was the title of a presentation that I prepared for the future elementary school teachers. The title got their attention, and the prisoners’ stories kept them riveted for the full hour. While none of these prisoners placed blame on their teachers for turning them into criminals, all of them had advice for how a teacher could spot a troubled child in her classroom and how to reach out to him. They also pointed out some of the ways in which even well-intentioned actions could backfire. Jon related his experiences as a boy who, because his father’s job required frequent transfers, was often the new kid in school. He admitted to engaging in some juvenile mischief, but nothing requiring the harsh treatment he received. One teacher, having heard of his reputation as a troublemaker, singled him out at the start of the school year—literally, singled him out. She made him spend the semester behind a partition in the back of the room, separated from the rest of the students. Over time, that led to his rejection of the teacher, of his schoolwork, of school. That led to the streets, to drugs, to violence. Jon connected the dots by concluding, “Stick me behind a partition, and I grow up and kill someone.” My end-of-semester surveys always showed this presentation to be the most impactful moment of the semester. It was a lesson that I knew my students would remember when they started working with little Larrys, Dustins, and Patricks. And I